Steve Kiene - Internap

Steve Kiene has been with Internap since May 2008, according to his profile on Linkedin:

Senior Director, Technology Engineering

Internap

(Public Company; Internet industry)

May 2008 — January 2009 (9 months)

My team is responsible for getting things done.

Vice President, Engineering

Internap

(Public Company; INAP; Internet industry)

January 2009 — Present (4 months)

I am in charge of the software engineering teams at Internap. I am also in charge of our CDN strategy and vision, as well as future products yet to be announced.

His description, in his own words:

Steve Kiene’s Education

• School of Hard Knocks

  Life, The real world, 1970 — 2008

  I didn't go to college. I didn't even bother to finish high school- I left to start a software company.

We previously quoted a small article about him:

Kiene and crew keen on new Web challenges

What is interesting is that it seems that he writes on the Yahoo MB. The person under his nickname (steve_kiene) has written just a few posts so far, since 2006:

If we look at some of his previous posts about Digital River (a company he sold his previous venture to), it might sound it's the real him:

>>I have to be a bit careful here (I don't want to get sued by DR for talking about confidential things) because I know a lot about the DR-MSFT stuff. However, if I think about only what's publicly known here's what I think:

Our two cents: employees of a public Company shouldn't be allowed to write on a public forum. However, here are his two Internap related posts so far:

>>Anyone can announce that in the future they are going to support something.

Internap already supports Flash Media Server 3.5 with it's DVR and multi-bit rate capabilities. It was released in production on the entire CDN on January 12, 2009.

Silverlight Smooth Streaming capability was released in production on April 24, 2009.

We generally don't talk publicly about what we might do someday. When we release something new, we make sure our customers know about it. That's how we're rebuilding our credibility in the CDN market.

If anything comes from us in the mobile space, our customers will be the first to know.

Down the road, I hope we'll have a level of credibility in the marketplace that allows us to pre-announce things and have it mean something. Under-promise and over-deliver is our focus.

>>Internap fully rolled out Flash Media Server 3.5 the same morning it was announced by Adobe. We just finished rolling out version 3.5.1. I don't think anyone other than Internap has 3.5.1 in full production.

A key point about going after medium-sized customer rather than very large customers- the margins are much higher with medium-sized customers. I'll take 10 medium customers over one large customer any day. Larger customers also require dedicated staff- something I don't see as the best use of our team at this time.

"Bread crumbs" for Akamai are high margin customers that we can focus on and service very well.